Letters to the Editor June 9

I am once again reading that a group of fanatics from a small church is still bent on disrupting military funerals. They say God is punishing America for allowing homosexuality, and they are protesting funerals of service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I will not go into their weird theology, but instead, I want to address the Supreme Court's protection of their right to protest.

Free speech is everyone's right, but we all acknowledge that shouting fire in a crowded movie theater is wrong. I'll take this a little further. A member of PETA has no right to taunt diners for eating meat in a restaurant; they would be arrested.

This example pales when compared to harassing grieving family members at a military funeral. The meat-eating diner would be annoyed, but the family member would be devastated.

The yelling of fire, the annoyed meat eater and the family members' anguish are all harms from a person abusing their right to free speech. The Supreme Court got it wrong.

Ronald H. Adams

Dayton

What defines a police state? The Soviet Union was a police state with the police power vested in what was originally called the Cheka. East Germany had the Stasi, Iran had the Savak and Nazi Germany had the Gestapo. All of these organizations could arrest and imprison anyone for any reason, real or suspected, and keep them indefinitely without any recourse to due process of law.

This very same police power now exists in the United States under the outrageously misnamed Patriot Act and Military Tribunal courts. A new agency has been created called Homeland Security with Fusion Centers where personal data is collected and exchanged between all divisions of police and intelligence agencies from local to international. The new Fusion Centers with modern means of surveillance now available to them make the old secret police agencies appear deaf and blind.

Police are being indoctrinated by anti-American organizations that masquerade as civil rights groups to be SWAT soldiers and to regard ordinary citizens who display any dissatisfaction with any aspect of government as an anti-government enemy and a potential terrorist.

Many ordinary activities are being described to them as suspicious. The head of Homeland Security has asked us to observe Walmart shoppers for suspected terrorist activity. President Obama has said, "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

Alan C. Edwards

Carson City